Vengeance or Intelligence?
Feb 4th, 2010 | 9 responses
“As Abdulmutallab keeps talking, Republicans won’t take yes for an answer.” That was Keith Olbermann tonight [kk: last night by now], talking about the Republican response to the news that Abdulmutallab is continuing to give authorities actionable intelligence using traditional, non-coercive interrogation methods.
It’s a development that conflicts with their meme about how Abdulmutallab should have been taken to Guantanamo and tortured to force him to say everything he knew — that he couldn’t possibly provide actionable intelligence under the same normal interrogation procedures that have been successfully used on every other terrorist suspect arrested inside the United States since 9/11.
In service to this deeply held belief, Republican leaders and right-wing pundits have developed a narrative that says Abdulmutallab stopped talking to FBI agents the moment he was read his rights under Miranda. According to this narrative, FBI agents questioned Abdulmutallab for about 50 minutes immediately after his arrest on December 25. Then he went into surgery to treat his burns, and when he came out, he was “Mirandized” and from that point on refused to say a single word. Furthermore, the narrative continues, the decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights was made without consulting any of the intelligence agencies.
The trouble with this narrative is that it’s largely untrue.
Take the claim that Abdulmutallab clammed up after being read his Miranda rights. The reverse is true:
The decision to advise the accused Christmas Day attacker of his right to remain silent was made after teleconferences involving at least four government agencies — and only after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had stopped talking to authorities, according to knowledgeable law enforcement officials.
As the above snip also makes clear, the decision to invoke Miranda was not made unilaterally:
Among those involved in the hastily called teleconferences were representatives from the Justice Department and the FBI, along with officials from the State Department and the CIA.
“It was a [law enforcement] community-wide conference, and they discussed a number of things,” one source said on condition of anonymity. “That’s when decisions were made on which course was going to proceed, to Mirandize him or otherwise.”
The source said that Abdulmutallab was not read his rights until he made it clear that he was not going to say anything else.
Via Adam Serwer at The American Prospect, who points out additionally that the intervention of his family members — which included the reassurance that Abdulmutallab would be treated humanely — was key to securing Mutallab’s renewed cooperation.
Yesterday, Eric Holder sent a letter to Mitch McConnell that addressed the Miranda issue, as well as the numerous other misstatements of fact that McConnell and many other Republican leaders and conservative pundits and media outlets have been passing around.
Adam Serwer points to the AG’s correctives to the Republican leadership’s misinformation with regard to the state of the law on civilian versus military trials and access to legal counsel (emphasis is in original):
Republicans have been trying to use Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair‘s testimony before the Senate a few weeks ago to argue the decision about how to deal with Abdulmutallab wasn’t made in consultation with intelligence and military officials, but here Holder says the opposite is true. “No agency supported the use of law of war detention for Abdulmutallab,” writes Holder, “and no agency has since advised the Department of Justice that an alternative course of action should have been, or should now be, pursued.”As to whether or not Abdulmutallab should have been allowed access to counsel, Holder offers a doozy:
Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney. But the government’s legal authority to do so is far from clear. In fact, when the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor as Attorney General. In fact, there is no court-approved system currently in place in which suspected terrorists captured inside the United States can be detained and held without access to an attorney; nor is there any known mechanism to persuade an uncooperative individual to talk to the government that has been proven more effective than the criminal justice system.
Scott Horton teases out several largely unexamined assumptions that underlie the Republican insistence that suspected terrorists (without the qualifier “suspected” for Republicans) must be kept out of the criminal justice system, and rebuts each one. The assumptions are: (1) “[t]he idea that criminal justice is ‘weak’ and war is ‘strong’ … (2) [t]he idea that the criminal justice and war paradigms are mutually exclusive … (3) [t]he idea that military commissions will lead with more certainty to convictions and long sentences … (4) [the idea that] [t]here is [a] meaningful difference in the Bush and Obama approaches; and (5) [t]he idea that justice is [...] a weakness.”
Rebuttals are here, along with Scott’s conclusion:
When the Republicans rant about trials and arrests, they want to distract us from the mistakes they made over the last eight years, which cost the nation precious blood and treasure, and which continue to hamper us in the battle against terrorism. Much of the argument offered by the Republican leaders is not carefully studied strategy, but rather an attempt to cover up horrendous mistakes of the past. The real worry is not that the Obama Administration has deviated from the course that the Bush-Cheney team set, but that it [is] more a prisoner of the past than it needs to be.
9 Responses to “Vengeance or Intelligence?”
As usual the blame game. Nobody did anything wrong but if they did it wasn't me and it depends on when when was.
Let's hope, by now, they have a 92-page operational bulletin for the next guy/gal.
Yes, it is the usual blame game, but only one side is playing it. Right now, Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration are playing defense, which they have every right to do and in fact have neglected to do for far too long.
Put another way, there would have been no negative references to the Bush administration — no blame, zero, nada, zip — if Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, the Republicans in Congress, and the entire right-wing side of the blogosphere had not started piling on Obama the instant the attempted bombing on Christmas day hit the news, and if even before then Republicans in Congress AND a former vice-president and his daughter aided by Fox No-News-Here Network had not been screaming and pounding at and on Obama since Day One of his presidency about how he was endangering national security by adhering to the law and traditional American values.
If you don't want to be blamed for something that, objectively, is your darn fault, then don't try to cover up your own culpability by aggressively blaming others for your own failures.
In other words, and in short: Give me a break, dduck.
It's the failed vigilante.
In many cultures, including the Western ones, we glorify and often live vicariously through the sole male (or sometimes an appropriately masculine female) who realizes the inadequacy of the systems' alloted protections and go rogue, taking out their own justice. Falling Down, Death Sentence and tonnes of “revenge” movies with various scope. You can't get justice through Good means, so you turn to Evil and triumph, the audience gets their moral pornography.
But when the vigilante strikes imprecisely, desperately and emotionally, like the mediocre, pasty, pipe-chewing and “Ayrab”-hating good-ole-boys who torture and abuse prisoners, we retch and snarl with distaste. Nothing is more satisfying than a competent vigilante, which is why nothing is more aesthetically displeasing than an incompetent one.
America is an ostensibly, symbolically Good Guy desperately and childishly trying its hands at Evil in order to scrub off the imprint of 9/11. This is why I loathe all the people who defend waterbaording and want the ugliness of the last administration to be forgotten – not because they acted evilly – I can defend many acts of Evil used against Evil (I would for example heartily defend a person somehow cheating in an election to defeat an anti-gay bigot) – but because they *tried to be the Good Guy Turned Slightly Rough*, which is so pathetic and dainty it fills me with pity.
If you had caught one of the girl-killing, acid-throwing taleban and tortured him after positive identification, I would probably have forgiven it. But instead you incompetently and smugly let loose a bunch of redneck scum on some random Arabs while then letting some snarling old dog and his little puppy daughter boast after the fact while moaning about “criminalizing policy differences”, thus managing to smear the good names of Good and Evil *at the same time* for no benefit. You wanted to *dabble* in Evil, symbolically *take off the silk gloves* – and I laugh at that kind of pathetic, unworthy vigilantism.
In other words, and in short: Give me a break”
I see your back in full prog form. Blame the other guy. (Oh, let me help you; they deserve it).
jeez, can't, or won't you make a short clear statement?
Is that too much to ask?
I see your back in full prog form. Blame the other guy.
They certainly deserve it, but that's not why they're getting it. They're getting it because they decided to attack the Obama administration, in every possible venue and at every possible opportunity, for, at least verbally, repudiating Bush-era policies. Since almost his first day in office, Republicans have been accusing Obama of being soft on terrorists, of endangering national security, of abandoning the “successful” C.I.A. interrogation program, of fomenting terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by trying suspected terrorists in civillian courts and housing them in U.S. prisons, of releasing Gitmo detainees who then turn around and rejoin Al Qaeda and launch attacks on Americans (ignoring the fact that all of the released Gitmo detainees who have done that were released by the Bush administration). Over and over again, Dick Cheney has pulled himself out of mothballs and gone on Fox and written articles and given speeches declaring that Pres. Obama does not think terrorism is a problem, that he never uses the word “terrorism,” that he thinks we're not at war with terrorists, that he's dangerously naive and inviting another attack, and on and on.
This has been going for a year, dduck, and every single last one of those accusations I listed above are completely and utterly and absolutely, 100 percent WRONG. It's the Republicans who have been heaping venom on Obama for changing disastrous policies that violate our values and incalculably damaged our national security. It hasn't been Obama's people proactively blaming the Republicans all this time for the mess they made of national security. It has, however, been the Obama administration implementing and carrying out the smartest, most sensible, and most successful counter-terrorism and national security procedures in decades. Just the approach they've taken to Abdulmutallab's interrogation alone has already been hugely successful in getting crucial intelligence without sacrificing our principles or violating the law. They have put Bush and Cheney and the rest of those cowboys to shame. And they know it. And they can't stand it, for a Democratic president to be better than they are at national security. And for you to say “You're back in prog form, blame the other guy” is just you saying whatever feels good to you and happens to come into your head, whether it's actually true, or not. You did not engage with my points from before at all (which is why I'm repeating them). You made absolutely no attempt to refute them in any way. All you have left, then, is to ignore everything I wrote and repeat the same nonsensical twaddle. And I'm sure you'll do it again.
He doesn't even approach DLS's record.
And as we know, a “short clear statement” isn't much use if it doesn't say anything.'
Congratulations, you just made one. And mine do say something. DLS also has the same affliction even if he is opposed to most of your views. (And, there are others, L&R.)
And I'm sure you'll do it again.”
Yes I twaddle while I waddle. “You however spend words like they are worth nothing”- Unknown